Manual Labeling Versus Barcoding

Lab Academy

Trying to Encipher Some Vessel Labels? “Stored vessels must be labeled” – in principle, every lab member confirms this. In reality you always find some (or even more) vessels in your freezer without any labeling or with a labeling looking like art. In many labs, there is a second rule: Label-free vessels are disposed as soon as they are found.

Printed labels on vessels (plain writing or barcode) are recommended to make reading as easy as possible for everyone else besides the author.

Labels
In a first step of improvement from handwriting, printed labels made of office paper secured by transparent duct tape can be used. Special adhesive labels based on water-resistant paper and water-resistant printing are the next step. Labels should be attached to the side of the tube. The lid surface is challenging due to the small area.

Barcodes
The top class of safe sample identification are barcodes. A barcode is an optical representation of data, which is machine-readable. Machine-readable means readable by a scanner, e.g. a handheld barcode-scanner. We are used to them from e.g. the daily shopping at the supermarket. The label can be limited to the pure barcode or barcode plus plain writing for human reading. The barcode can be printed on adhesive labels or directly printed/ lasered on vessels.

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1D barcodes

A classic 1D barcode codes data by varying the width of the parallel lines as well as their spacings.
1D barcodes are based on different types (i.e. languages), e.g. type 128.

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Manual Labeling Versus Barcoding

1D barcodes